Hi Ilari,

To quote RFC 9528: "EDHOC uses COSE for cryptography and identification of
credentials (including COSE_Key, CBOR Web Token (CWT), CWT Claims Set
(CCS), X.509, and CBOR-encoded X.509 (C509) certificates; see
Section 3.5.2).  COSE provides crypto agility and enables the use of
future algorithms and credential types targeting IoT."

EDHOC utilizes the COSE Algorithms Registry, COSE header parameters, 
COSE_Encrypt0, and optionally COSE_Sign1 and COSE_Key. While EDHOC initially 
represented each message as nested COSE structures, it was soon recognized that 
some of the targeted network technologies would benefit greatly from a more 
compressed encoding.

>Would that be sufficient? Section 3.7. of rfc9528 seems to use
>(modified) COSE_Key structure. And that requires codepoints for the
>keys.
>
>(The construction only being defined for EC2 and OKP is unlikely to
>become a problem, as any modern KEM design should be using OKP. This
>holds for ML-KEM and the CFRG hybrids.)
>
>FIPS 203 does not register the codepoints, and I am not aware of any
>draft seeking to do so. Furthermore, there seems to be opposition for
>it. AKP keys are not suitable for EDHOC, because EDHOC does not use
>COSE algorithms.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-spm-lake-pqsuites/
proposes to register EDHOC cipher suites based on the
draft-ietf-jose-pqc-kem COSE algorithms and specifies
the exact data transmitted over the wire in EDHOC.

In the future, LAKE would likely want to use CWTs with public
KEM keys for authentication.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pocero-authkem-ikr-edhoc/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-pocero-authkem-edhoc/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-papon-lake-pq-edhoc/

LAKE has just been rechartered to be able to adopt and work
on making EDHOC quantum-resistant.

Cheers,
John Preuß Mattsson

From: Ilari Liusvaara <[email protected]>
Date: Saturday, 7 March 2026 at 08:25
To: [email protected] <[email protected]>, cose <[email protected]>
Subject: [COSE] Re: [jose] Re: COSE and LAKE needs draft-ietf-jose-pqc-ke (was 
Proposal: Use HPKE for JWE PQ/PQT straight away)

On Fri, Mar 06, 2026 at 06:01:25PM +0000, John Mattsson wrote:
>
> Ilari Liusvaara wrote:
> >From quick read, it seems to me that what is needed
> >is a key format for PQ keys
>
> EDHOC would need on-the-wire formats for ek, and c, and these are
> already defined in FIPS 203

Would that be sufficient? Section 3.7. of rfc9528 seems to use
(modified) COSE_Key structure. And that requires codepoints for the
keys.

(The construction only being defined for EC2 and OKP is unlikely to
become a problem, as any modern KEM design should be using OKP. This
holds for ML-KEM and the CFRG hybrids.)

FIPS 203 does not register the codepoints, and I am not aware of any
draft seeking to do so. Furthermore, there seems to be opposition for
it. AKP keys are not suitable for EDHOC, because EDHOC does not use
COSE algorithms.




-Ilari

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